


nacre

by Maiden_of_the_Moon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alpha!Martin, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Episode 181, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, M/M, No beta we kayak like Tim, Omega!Jon, Unplanned Pregnancy, season five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:14:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26802733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maiden_of_the_Moon/pseuds/Maiden_of_the_Moon
Summary: A pearl is created, Jon is suddenly Informed,when an irritant of some kind— a grain of sand, perhaps, or a parasite, or some other manner of 'seed'— makes its way into the body of a mollusk.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 23
Kudos: 123





	nacre

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escherzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/gifts).
  * Inspired by [safe from harm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26743270) by [escherzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escherzo/pseuds/escherzo). 



> _Disclaimer:_ Nope.
> 
>  _Author’s Note:_ Me: Didn’t I basically write this idea already?  
> Also Me: Holy shit two cakes. 
> 
> Anyway, I’m still thinking about “safe from harm” by escherzo. Please think about it with me. 
> 
> _Warnings:_ Based on “safe from harm” by escherzo, so: post-181 ABO dynamics. Unplanned pregnancy. Gratuitous parentheses usage. Quotes taken from the show/unofficial transcripts and “safe from harm;” knowledge taken from wiki. No beta.

\---

nacre

\---

It isn’t that Jon does not _Know_ what happened.

(Knowledge rises like the tide, in and out and in and _in_ , pulling him under and ripping from his lungs all the air that he no longer needs.)

It isn’t that Jon does not _remember_ what happened. 

(Through the haze of misty memory, he recognizes shapes. Vague forms, distorted when projected onto the fog in his brain.) 

It is that Jon had _forgotten_ what happened. Or rather, he had forgotten that it happened to him. It was not the arc of a book; it was not the plot of a movie; it was, and it was _real_. 

Love is its own special horror. As such, it is not terror’s antithesis; Jon can love as hard, as desperately, as foolishly as he chooses. But tranquility? Comfort? Safety? They are phantasmagorical to him— nigh literally, in their way. Phantom limbs causing phantom pain, and ghostly touches that Jon had done his honest best to hold onto, but it does not take omnipotence to realize that such a feat is impossible. 

Happiness is like water dripping through cupped hands. Like sand slipping through his fingers, or the neck of an hour glass. 

(Time had meaning, there. Those hours— that sand— it had _meaning_ there. But now the remnants of Upton House are naught but abrasive: grit that threatens to eat into the flesh. To burrow and to fester.) 

And so, in fits and bursts and lines blurred to nihility, Jon had forgotten. He had forgotten Upton House in the way that all dreams are eventually forgotten, even those dreams that had once been inexorably tied to the anchor of reality. 

( _A pearl is created_ , Jon is Informed in a rush, _when an irritant of some kind— a grain of sand, perhaps, or a parasite, or some other manner of ‘seed’— makes its way into the body of a mollusk_.)

It is only after he finds himself swaying, impossibly nauseous, over a puddle of his own fresh sick, that Jon considers that anchor. 

(His anchor.) 

That he recalls how his reality _is_ one of dreams. 

(Other people’s dreams.) 

Bad dreams, maybe.

(Nightmares that he watched and consumed and absorbed and embodied and lived and lived and _lived_.) 

But they are dreams nonetheless.

-

His leg still hurts. Aches, really. Past the bone, beyond the marrow. It hurts in Jon’s _soul_ : a slow, uneven crush of pain, like closing jaws or the press of earth.

(Dream logic. Jon had developed a soft spot for Daisy; of course she would have no trouble sinking her fangs into it.) 

And therein lies the paradox, the germ of truth around which this Wonderland has shaped its lies. Jon cannot be hurt in this place, except by those whose hands already hold his heart. Jon cannot die in this place, except there are still choices it would kill him to make. 

(Jon is impregnable in this place, except—) 

Vulnerability breeds vulnerability. 

“ _Also known as mother of pearl, nacre is an organic–inorganic composite material which coats the inner shells of some mollusks, as well as serves as the main component of pearls. Nacre is famed for its strength, resilience, and iridescence_ ,” Jon vomits, sour strings of saliva chaining the regurgitated information together. That he is again on hands and knees is an irony that does not escape him. Another heave: “ _Nacre assists in the defense of tissues, protecting the mollusk’s innards by entombing the parasite or irritant in a ‘blister pearl’ which attaches to the interior of the shell. The process is called encystation. It continues for as long as the mollusk lives._ ” 

A final consonant remains stuck in Jon’s gullet. He retches, spitting it into a growing pool of ichor, before collapsing into a heap beside his recorder. 

“~~~…” 

There is another wave to the queasiness. There always is. But all it manages now is to remind Jon of Forsaken: rolling, surging, constant, dull. He rides it out with his eyes closed. His head lolled. Sweat seeps down his temple as blood from an altar: dripping in great, brackish drops that the worms in the dirt will no doubt mistake as rain. Another downpour from above. 

(Dazedly, Jon thinks on the many ways a man can drown, heart and hand sinking to the space below his belly.)

-

He does not wonder _why_.

He does not need to wonder. He Knows, obviously. Whether he wants to or not, he Knows. But even if Jon did not Know— even if he were still human and reckless enough to celebrate the idea of ignorance—, it would not be hard to guess the reason that the Ceaseless Watcher might feel compelled to turn a blind Eye to his dalliance with humanity. 

(“ _Yeah, but if, if you’re that connected, that dependent, what happens if we actually, y’know, do manage to—”_

 _“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Jon had said, having long-since presumed and accepted the toll that awaited. What is his life, after all, if not a price to be willingly paid? The only value Jon sees in himself is in relation to where he stands with Martin, to his feelings for Martin, what he can do to save Martin. To keep Martin whole, and happy, and alive. Every part of him. Every piece._ ) 

“Tell me about ‘nice,’” Jon says over the quiet squelch of rot. The landscape they traverse is a bruise gone septic, its trees like burst arteries and its ponds acidic with bile. There are no blessings anymore, but he is close enough to god to suspect that the stench of this realm is in answer to his unspoken prayer. Though he and Martin are side by side, the only sweetness Jon can smell is that of decay. There is no room for life. 

And that’s good. That’s… well. Nice. 

(But that’s the problem with nice things, isn’t it? They are just waiting to be damaged, just begging to be broken. _They tend not to stay nice out here_.) 

Martin frowns. Jon Sees this more than sees it, as Martin had pulled his sweater neck above his nose. “I mean… I will if you want me to, Jon. But I’ve already— there’s nothing more I can say? I don’t— I don’t think you want me, you know, making up stories or waxing lyrical about every time you scratched your chin.” 

“You do still owe me a poem recitation, now that I think of it.” 

“ _Roses were red, violets were blue, Jon was a jerk— no wait, that’s still true._ ” 

“Still better than anything Keats wrote.”

“Have I mentioned, I find it comforting that omnipotence has no bearing on taste.” 

When Jon’s lips pull back in a smile, he can feel the remains of data atop his teeth. A fragmented fact still lies bitter on his tongue— _it is a defense mechanism, the way a mollusk will cocoon that irritant, that parasite, in lustrous layers_ — and he wishes, more than anything, that he might Know what to say. How to say it. 

( _“Vomit your horrors” had been Martin’s first metaphor, followed swiftly by “puke your terrors,” and the part of Jon that still mentally wanders Helen’s impossible corridors half-wants to believe that this is all some elaborate manifestation of his own fears and paranoias, but no. No, more likely what connects his thoughts of the past to his present situation is too fine and silkily-spun to be Seen._ ) 

“I just…” Jon hesitates, waiting for the words to drain of that crackling energy that turns his mouth and others’ minds to static, “it’s… It’s an isolating sort of feeling, isn’t it? To— to experience something good, but. But to do so alone. Or to, um. To know— know so much, but…. Well. I suppose I…I find myself feeling a bit…” 

(“ _It’s the Lonely, Jon. It’s me._ ”)

Martin’s fingers lace through Jon’s like a beautiful corruption. And isn’t _that_ symbolic? 

(“ _What we all are,” Jane had written, “when you strip away the pretense that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. That love us in their way._ ”) 

“What can I do?” Martin asks, so gentle that Jon cannot but remember how his first mark had come from the Spider. The self-loathing is immediate, and visceral, and does nothing to stop him.

(“ _Love that consumes you in all ways._ ”)

“I won’t Look deep, I promise,” he vows, turning amidst the fungal blooms and corpse flowers to gaze pleadingly up at his alpha. One hand squeezes; the other reaches up to touch Martin’s troubled face. To trace invisible lines between the gore of his freckles. “I _swear_ , Martin. I’ll only Look at Upton House. Only at what happened there. I think— I _suspect_ — that if I _Know_ the details from you, then I’ll be able to… to retain the experience… in ways that I can’t on my own. In ways different than when you tell me about it.” 

“Like… the way these hellscapes make you feel so much that you have to do recordings about them?” Martin surmises. The shadows in the pinch between his brows match those that linger beneath his eyes. “Do you… Will that _really_ help?” 

Yes. No. There is no _help_ to be had, anymore. Not really. Not here, not now, not ever, maybe. Probably.

“Please,” Jon whispers, and Martin does not resist: does not stop Jon from touching their foreheads together, lashes of a hundred-thousand ommatidial eyes fluttering low. 

(There is warmth in the shallows of Martin’s memory, a heat that rolls and climbs and undulates between foam-white sheets and five types of bubble bath; that pulls Jon down and laps Jon up and he is wet, _soaking_ , sinking, sinking, _sinking_ —) 

“A- _ah_ —”

“Jon, are you—? Oh…” 

( _He tries to speak, and no words— lets himself feel it as— back and forth as he breeds him, little shocks of sensation sparking through his system_.)

“Martin,” Jon gasps, the name made ragged by too much emotion and too little breath. His heart pounds in his ears, echoing the rhythm that he Sees their bodies set; he can feel his legs give out beneath him, sense the instant that his vision goes a pleasured pearl-white. “Ma… _ah_ …” 

(“ _I love you._ ” “ _I love you, too._ ”) 

Anchors. Connection. Parasites. Love. There are fingers pulling at him, holding him down-up-together, as his own tangle in curls that trap like a web. Jon only realizes that he is kissing Martin when his mouth fills with the tang of unwritten verse: a jumble of velvet verbs and malleable adjectives and nouns that have putrefied like fruit in the sun. 

Jon only realizes that Martin is kissing him back when the fluid in his spine runs cold.

There is— 

(— _a hand over the flat of his own stomach, trying to feel Martin from the outside. Martin’s hand joins his and presses down a little, and_ oh, _he can feel it. Just a little, with Martin this deep in him, but_ —) 

—it is enough to blow Martin’s eyes open wide. 

“Wh—?” 

Jon staggers, Knowledge-drunk and tingling, as Martin’s hand slips further beneath the bulk of Jon’s jumper. The touch is less steadying now, more seeking. An investigative pressure, fueled by alarm and disbelief, and Jon whimpers a warning moan when calluses drag too-roughly over the bulge’s firm edges. 

Something inside him shifts, breaches, almost imperceptibly. 

(Almost.) 

“J—Jon…?” 

Rucking up Jon’s undershirt exposes a stomach that isn’t so flat as it had been in their briefly-shared memory. There is a distinctive roundness to it, now— slight but ever-swelling—, and its reveal has left Martin gawping, a wounded sound escaping his throat upon discovering that the distention curves perfectly to fit in his palm. 

He looks at Jon with shining eyes— a sheen that Jon is tempted to call nacreous. 

(“ _But you won’t,” Martin had said, his laughter disparaging. Sharp. It cut into the core of Jon, pointed and true. “That’s why you came to me, isn’t it? You know I can’t do it, not now; you don’t want to blind yourself; you don’t want to die; what you want is a reason to not do those things, so— you come to me._ ”) 

And Jon knows he has to live.

\---


End file.
